Aldous Huxley

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.